In the fields of project feasibility analysis, project optimization, and project structuring, a project manager may evaluate likely alternatives and consider the impact of these alternatives on the profitability and potential success of a proposed project. Existing tools can calculate project profitability measures such as return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) for a single set of project characteristics including data such as price, cost, volume, and taxes. Multiple changes in project characteristics become increasingly difficult to analyze and interpret.
Originally decisions whether to go forward with a project were made by gut feelings about the potential success of the project. This made evaluating single projects and alternative projects difficult. This problem has been partially solved by the implementation of graphs of profitability measures but these had and still have significant problems.
The RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) TOOL in U.S. Pat. No. 7,647,260 to Milleker et al., Jan. 12, 2010 calculates ROI profitability measure.
The DISPLAY OF MULTIPLE VARIABLE RELATIONSHIPS in U.S. Pat. No. 5,307,455 to Higgins et al., Apr. 26, 1994 displays multiple variable relationships.
The PERFORMING WHAT-IF ANALYSIS in U.S. Pat. No. 9,183,506 to Rahmouni et al., Nov. 10, 2015 determines a likelihood of a particular event occurring and a likely impact of the particular event.
The USER INTERFACE FOR REPRESENTING MULTIPLE DATA SETS ON A COMMON GRAPH in U.S. Pat. No. 7,248,263 to Freeman et al., Jul. 24, 2007 displays one or more data sets, having varying scales on a common X-Y graph with one X-axis and one Y-axis.
The METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR DATA SELECTION AND DISPLAY in U.S. Pat. No. 8,132,101 to Buck et al., Mar. 6, 2012 displays two Y-axis on a single graph. The coordinates for the second Y-axis are distinct from the first unit of measure.
The DYNAMIC PRESENTATION GENERATOR in U.S. Pat. No. 7,607,089 to Baker et al., Oct. 20, 2009 creates a multiple slide presentation with common branding and common appearance through multiple slides.
We have found that existing tools fail to resolve the problem of information overflow.
Information overflow occurs when a human operator tries to understand the resultant effect on the feasibility and profitability of a project when multiple simultaneous changes occur in financial characteristics of the project. What is needed is a method, without going back to a computer, for determining the change in profitability measures, dependent variables, of a project caused by both singular and multiple changes in one or more of the project base case financial metrics, independent variables.